3 Body Problem Boss Explains How Global COVID Response Influenced Humanity In The Netflix Series
The villain of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem is existential instead of literal. The first season is about the human race discovering that a potentially hostile alien race is coming to invade in a few centuries, and the world’s brightest minds have to figure out how to address the incoming threat, or whether to address it all.
“It’s a choice between optimism or action to right wrongs, so a passive optimism or the choice to go in and get your hands dirty,” series star Rosalind Chao explained to GameSpot in a recent interview. “[The creators] really made it so that people from every corner of the world can identify. It’s certainly not sci-fi. It’s about humans interacting in periods of great stress and possible elimination.”
3 Body Problem is adapted from Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy by Game of Thrones bosses David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and The Terror: Infamy creator Alexander Woo. In a January profile in The Hollywood Reporter, they explained how the TV series, and the novels, are more about how humanity addresses the possible threat than about “fighting tentacle monsters.” During a roundtable interview with the executive producers attended by GameSpot, Benioff elaborated that plotting the adaptation during COVID gave the three executive producers a first-hand look at how humanity would respond to a global crisis.